July 19, 2011 02:43 AM UTC

LiveWell CO's BMI-Based PR Campaign

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• by: irkedbyzealots

Anyone else not totally comfortable with LiveWell Colorado‘s campaign to promote healthy eating & active lifestyle choices? Denver’s major daily summarized the campaign, but in brief, the campaign uses pictures of people with different body types, then classifies them as “obese,” “overweight,” or some other characterization based on the Body Mass Index scale.

I cross-posted at Feministing.com about this, but the gist of my discomfort is the campaign perpetuates height-weight ratios and not-universally-endorsed metrics as reflective of a person’s health. Even worse, LiveWell Colorado is wading into public health debate and policy without any sort of recognition or responsible conversation, at least on its Web site, about BMI, body types, social constructs of beauty, etc., as contributors to body image disorders.

I get that a social marketing campaign to fundamentally change people’s behavior and decision-making about diet and exercise needs to have a surface-level entry point to grab people’s attention. But given the very real challenges that people with body dysmorphia, bulima, and other body-image disorders face, is a PR campaign that is so visually body-image-oriented the most responsible path to take?